Hathor: Excellent Stanford talk - "Embodying the Goddess: Revealing the Practice of Tattooing in Ancient Egypt," Thanks to your talk, I may in subsequent Harbin books I write seek to make distinctions about questions of culture - e.g. "religious culture" and "culture more generally," How will all of this emerge digitally and for "publishing" Harbin in a film-realistic, 3D, interactive, group build-able, wiki with avatars, and in all 8K languages, and for later research are fascinating questions for me ...

Hi Anne,

I enjoyed your excellent "Embodying the Goddess: Revealing the Practice of Tattooing in Ancient Egypt" - http://events.stanford.edu/events/608/60867/ archaeological/anthropological talk (with its interpretive emphasis on the Egyptian Goddess Hathor) on Friday evening at Stanford a lot. Your recent remarkable and unusual find from about 3200-3500 years ago of a (female) mummy with tattoos in Egypt raises all kinds of creative and interesting new interpretive possibilities in your discipline (which are approaches I enjoy, for example, and in writing my Actual~Virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnography - http://www.scottmacleod.com/ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html). How does the academic literature on Ancient Egypt further distinguish between religious culture/discourse and culture/discourse beyond Ancient Egyptian "religion" and "decorum"? Thanks for your helpful reply to my question. (I asked this question with "religious culture" in India and religious culture in "U.S." today  in mind, for example, and by way of very loose comparison, as distant as these are from each other and from scholars' understandings of Ancient Egypt's "religion," which is not generally as "culture," in my very, very limited reading. India is still very religious in my interpretation and in ongoing ways in the modern world / the information age, having visited 3 times). Ancient Egyptian "culture," archaeologically, is such a fascinating topic and so distant, especially given Anthropology's theoretical developments over the past, say, 100 years. 

Understanding Ancient Egyptian culture, both "religious" and in complementary "not-religious" ways further would be significant in, for example, beginning to create a data set which might inform a virtual earth in Google Street View/Maps/Earth with time slider - for ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy (here's the Ethno-Wiki-Virtual-World-Graphy label in my blog

http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy) - in the places and periods in which you do field work, Anne, and the questions you are asking. Both tattooing and how such new data, and finds, might create very new developments in interpreting Ancient Egyptian culture (fabric of daily life) could be further engaged very generatively with developing information technologies in so many ways (not to overstate the obvious:). 

Your talk also highlighted the significance of digital technologies in revealing new finds. In my ongoing Harbin ethnographic research, where I hope in part to create a virtual Harbin Hot Springs as ethnographic field site for ongoing comparative anthropological study in something like Google Street View with time slider with OpenSimulator, your talk on tattooing suggested to me that people reading my book 3,500 years from now, or looking at the virtual Harbin/earth then from around now might also begin to ask questions of (or make discoveries about) tattooing at Harbin, for example - of which there is some, and viewable in the Harbin pool area. 

And thanks to your talk, I may in subsequent Harbin books I write seek to make distinctions about questions of culture -  e.g. "religious culture" and "culture more generally" - further re Harbin, which emerges out of California in the 1960s and 1970s as counterculture, in my interpretation, and is also a little New Agey as well as "California" culturally. Harbin is both two churches, HCC (http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/Heart%20Consciousness%20Church) and NACOB - but which aren't affiliated with any other churches and which may have been a hippy tax dodge in 1975 and 1996, and Harbin embodies a kind New Age clothing-optional hippy culture (e.g. hippy Hinduism and Buddhism and language etc.) a few decades after the 1960s. How will all of this emerge digitally and for "publishing" Harbin in a film-realistic, 3D, interactive, group build-able, wiki with avatars, and in all 8K languages, and for later research are fascinating questions for me. Harbin is also simply a nice place to visit. (Have you been there?) 

(More about CC World University and School possibly in the future). 

Would you be available to have a coffee at Stanford (https://history.stanford.edu/people/anne-austin - http://www.anneeaustin.com - https://stanford.academia.edu/AnneAustin) to talk possibly further about some of these questions?

Thanks for your great talk.

Best regards, 

Scott

P.S.

Here's a slide presentation I gave at UC Berkeley in November re Ethno-Wiki-Virtual-World-Graphy - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2015/11/waters-36-slides-from-uc-berkeley-talk.html

Naked Harbin and Ethno-Wiki-Virtual-World-Graphy:

Methodologies for Ethnographically Studying Virtual Place: Virtual Harbin

36 slides from UC Berkeley talk on F 11/6/15

 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tAhXFinq8xm8BDFcceoHsNBHJi0wpS0HDFh40PXsQ2I/pub?start=
false&loop=false&delayms=3000

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_cattle

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